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dziemecki's blog

I've been tweaking my android for a couple months now, and have recently become enamored (obsessed?) with an app called Tasker. It's like a vendor sanctioned root-kit with a built in development platform. It's the kind of thing that couldn't happen on iOS, and ought to come with a warning label. It slices. It dices. It makes curly fries. This app is cooler than the other side of the pillow.

There are three things other people tend to do in their email that really annoy me. I haven’t found out how to detect and prevent an inappropriate “Reply-All” yet, but the other two, I have a handle on. This is how I put a stop to Blank Subjects and Missing Attachments in MS Outlook.

First, let met me give props to Google and every other VBA coder on the Internet. You can easily find this, or pieces of it, if you look for it. And are willing to glue it together as I have. Hopefully, I can save you a little trouble.

I have become a huge proponent of the “cloud as network” school of thought. I edit documents, check my mail, manage my calendar and track my projects, all online. I can work just about anywhere with an internet connection, and these days, that’s pretty much everywhere. Due to some excellent products that have recently reached maturity, I can extend that to my personal storage, as well.

A recent project had me scouring a code base for the cause of a site's incredibly poor performance. The site was pulling data from all over the place, and the code was extremely modular, nested, and non-linear, so tracking down the actual "Herbie" in the process was a real challenge. One of the first things I did was put together some "stopwatch" code to test the length of time each section took to run, as well as to test the impact of various changes on overall page load times. Here's what I came up with to measure and output the information.

I implemented the truly awesome Lightbox2 Drupal module for one of my customers recently. It performed as advertised pretty much out of the box. The photo gallery displayed in beautiful DHTML just like the big boys did it. Only problem, as was quickly pointed out to me, was that there was no way to actually download the pictures. Interesting oversight.

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About

I'm Dan Ziemecki, the author of this site and a technology professional working in the Atlanta area. "Excellent Cruft" is a journal wherein I log the lessons of my various projects (before I forget them) in an effort to give back to the community. Feel free to use anything you find here.